Anna Quindlen talks with Printers Row Live

With Mother’s Day on the horizon, it was an early gift for many of author Anna Quindlen’s fans as she communed with her Chicago peeps in these early days of a national book tour for her newly published memoir, “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.”

Quindlen was the guest for a Printers Row Live! program Friday night at Tribune Tower, holding forth in a girls’ night conversation with Elizabeth Taylor, the Tribune’s literary editor.

As is her wont, Quindlen amplified on themes of motherhood and family from the outset. After reading aloud the opening passage from her book, she spoke of the sometimes overwhelming expectations for women who try to manage their personal lives and build families and careers. “It’s so out of whack,” she said of the pressure and expectations, especially in comparison with men’s experiences.

This book arrives at a time when Quindlen is on the threshold of 60, and heads nodded as she noted that one of the joys of getting older is that you can once more be that authentic self that individuals are as children. “This is me,” she observed. “I’m fine.”

The discussion with Taylor touched on the importance of female friends in supporting one another as well as how much Quindlen values her experience at Barnard, a women’s college. “Is the magic the absence of men or the presence of women,” Taylor prompted.

“The magic,” Quindlen replied, “is the expectations.” Being at an all-women’s school taught her to speak up, to have confidence, to see that she and her classmates were all talented and capable. That experience made it possible for her to become a columnist, to dare to have opinions at a time when that was so contrary to how women of her generation were socialized, she said.

Since her writing career has trafficked in the personal, it was to be expected that Quindlen would want to talk about her three children, now adults making their way and, in some fashion, molding writing paths of their own. With great pleasure, Quindlen told the sold-out crowd of an interview she did with her son, Quindlen Krovatin, for Barnes & Noble Review. Here is a link: http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Interview/Anna-Quindlen-An-Interview-with-Mom/ba-p/7729

With Anna Quindlen just beginning her promotional tour, the questions from readers had the feeling of fresh discovery, while the answers seemed free of rote and tilting, if anything, toward reprises of favorite passages in the book.

And what did readers want her to talk about?

--Social media. Years ago, she promised her children she would not play on Facebook, but now they don’t care so much and she has tippy-toed into modest Facebook wall posts on behalf of her book publisher. Twitter? Not so much.

The pluses of social media are that more people are writing in various forms and that these channels create community, she said. But it can be “disconcerting” to see social media as a substitute for real-life experiences, Quindlen added.

--Her sons and feminism. She wanted her boys to not have a sense of entitlement and to appreciate women. Quindlen happily told a tale about her son accepting a black t-shirt with the saying, ‘Dare to use the F word,’ on front, coupled with ‘Feminist’ on the back. She complimented him, “and he said, ‘Yeah, chicks dig it.’”

--In praise of nuns. A reader noted that in a column Quindlen had praised the goodness of nuns and their social justice, and she spoke at length on the topic, which she also covers in the memoir. “The great work of social welfare” by Catholic institutions around the world “is disproportionately done by nuns,” Quindlen observed.

“If there is anyone who’s living the work of the New Testament, it’s the nuns of the Catholic church and not the Catholic hierarchy,” she said to applause.

--Loss. Inevitably, readers wanted to know Quindlen’s thoughts about dealing with the loss of a mother early in life. She has written – and continues to write – about the profound impact in her life of losing her mother to cancer when she was 19. She took time off from college to care for her mother and then, as the oldest sibling, to help set the household aright until she could hire a housekeeper and escape back to her life.

One reader talked of how she never knew her mother and wondered if it helped Quindlen or in some way freed her to be different from her mother.

Quindlen replied that while she loved her mother and her mother was beloved, she understood clearly that she was not like her mother. But at the same time, she was raised like her father’s oldest son. “There’s something really powerful about that for a girl,” Quindlen observed.

Quindlen made her mark first as a journalist. She won a Pulitzer Prize as a columnist for the New York Times and became a columnist at Newsweek. But all along, she told the audience, she nurtured a dream of being a novelist as well. As a kid, she imagined where in the public library her novel would perch. “It went between Marcel Proust and Ayn Rand,” she added.

Her book, “A Short Guide to a Happy Life,” sold more than a million copies. She has written six novels.